On a November afternoon in 1996, Lanny Davis got a phone call that
would change his life. It was from a top aide at the White House,
asking him if he was interested in joining the president's senior
staff. Within a few short weeks he had signed on as special counsel
to the president. Fourteen months later, his tour of duty almost
over, he got another phone call, this time from a "Washington Post"
reporter who asked, "Have you ever heard the name Monica Lewinsky?"
In the time between those two phone calls, Davis received an
extraordinary political education. As President Bill Clinton's
chief spokesman for handling "scandal matters" he had the
unenviable job of briefing reporters and answering their pointed
questions on the most embarrassing allegations against the
president and his aides, from charges of renting out the Lincoln
Bedroom, to stories of selling plots in Arlington Cemetery, from
irregular campaign fundraising to sexual improprieties. He was the
White House's first line of defense against the press corps and the
reporters' first point of entry to an increasingly reticent
administration. His delicate task was to remain credible to both
sides while surviving the inevitable crossfire.
Upon entering the White House, Davis discovered that he was
never going to be able to turn bad news into good news, but he
could place the bad news in its proper context and work with
reporters to present a fuller picture. While some in the White
House grew increasingly leery of helping a press corps that they
regarded as hostile, Davis moved in the opposite direction,
pitching unfavorable stories to reporters and helping them garner
the facts to write those stories accurately. Mostsurprisingly of
all, he realized that to do his job properly, he sometimes had to
turn himself into a reporter within the White House, interviewing
his colleagues and ferreting out information. Along the way, he
learned the true lessons of why politicians, lawyers, and reporters
so often act at cross-purposes and gained some remarkable and
counterintuitive insights into why this need not be the case.
Searching out the facts wherever he could find them, even if he had
to proceed covertly, Davis discovered that he could simultaneously
help the reporters do their jobs and not put the president in legal
or political jeopardy.
With refreshing candor, Davis admits his own mistakes and
reveals those instances where he dug a deeper hole for himself by
denying the obvious and obfuscating the truth. And in a powerful
reassessment of the scandal that led to the president's
impeachment, Davis suggests that if the White House had been more
receptive to these same hard-won lessons, the Monica Lewinsky story
might not have come so close to bringing down an otherwise popular
president. For as Davis learned above all, you can always make a
bad story better by telling it early, telling it all, and telling
it yourself.
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